From the Hard Left, New Yorker Editor Fears Hillary Has No Competition And a Weak Press

March 16th, 2015 1:45 PM

New Yorker editor David Remnick, formely a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, is a notable figure in the Thrill Up My Leg department for Obama, but is not much of a Hillary Clinton fan right now.

In a “Talk of the Town” essay in his magazine, he expressed disgust with her 21-minute press availability at the United Nations, "contrition was not in her plans. Instead, she chose a familiar course, offering explanations that were by turns petulant and pretzelled.”

As he warmly recalled her 1995 speech to a UN summit in Beijing on how “women’s rights are human rights,” he felt she was falling short of the feminist project:

“[S]he should have been returning to ... feminist themes, but she used the opportunity to claim that she was only trying to protect the sanctity of her communications about her ‘yoga routines,’ her daughter’s wedding, and her mother’s funeral. This was a notably transparent exploitation of gender. It’s one thing for a politician to be stupid; it is quite another for her to assume that we are.

Remnick, like a good lefty, was appalled that Mrs. Clinton would praise that alleged Vietnam War criminal Henry Kissinger in The Washington Post. But what might be most interesting is his concern at how the liberal press just won’t be enough of a challenge for her before she easily ascends to the White House, since the GOP challengers like Bush and Walker aren't "political colossi" walking the earth:

It is the job of the press to put pressure on power and on pretenders to power. Even in a solo primary race, reporters will scrutinize not only Hillary Clinton’s record but also her hawkish foreign-policy impulses, the dealings of the Clinton Global Initiative, and the contradiction between the need to ease the inequality gap and the candidate’s tropism toward big money. But, in the absence of a Democratic challenger, the pressure will never be what it ought to be....

However vexed by the politics of gender, America is ready for a woman President. Long past ready. A female President committed to the kind of vision Clinton set out twenty years ago in Beijing could exert a powerful influence on the lives of women all over the world. But if, in the end, Hillary Clinton’s only competition is herself, if all she has to contend with is the press and her less attractive instincts, she will have gained a too easy path to power at the cost of being less prepared to exercise it.